With innovative products that span multiple target markets under its belt, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), the world's leading motherboard, graphics card, barebone system, and notebook manufacturer, announces the latest product, the ECS Black Series P55H-AK motherboard, which has powerful specifications and takes on a classic black and white color scheme.

There were lots of insane overclocking events at COMPUTEX 2010; ECS successfully created a new overclocking standard - 5 GHz for Intel latest Core Unlocked processor (Unlocked processors refer to the Core i5-655K and Core i7-875K) using just a normal air cooler. Simply put, every user can boost their gaming system easily by using the ECS M.I.B. X tweaker - the special edition overclocking interface consolidates all information about overclocking for users; getting increased system performance using typical cooling isn't that hard anymore.

Conquer Your Games with Full Power
ECS P55H-AK is the very motherboard for hardcore gamers. Full speed 3-way NVIDIA SLI is possible on the P55H-AK, thanks to the NVIDIA NF200 chipset. ECS provides amazing DDR3-2600+ memory overclocking capabilities for boosting memory bandwidth, allowing smoother performance in the latest real-time 3D games.

Moreover, with SATA 6G and eSATA 6G ports powered by Marvell, the data throughput ceiling increases by two-fold. When using high speed storage devices such as solid state drives, expect quicker game loading times over the previous generation interface. Besides internal storage, there are four USB 3.0 ports on the P55H-AK, two of which are available as a front panel header for easy file transfers with USB 3.0 external storage via USB 3.0-capable ports on the front of your casing.

ECS Qooltech III technology is a dual-heatpipe with huge heatsink designed passive cooler to ensure the stability of system when overclocking or working for extended periods.

ECS exclusive applications like eOC, eJIFFY, eBLU, eDLU deliver convenience for users, such as extracting more performance from the system safety, providing an alternative choice for Internet surfing, as well as keeping BIOS and drivers up to date.

The ECS Black Series P55H-AK motherboard limited edition is available now.

I love how they advertise "USING JUST A NORMAL AIRCOOLER" because the motherboard has so much to do with cooling the chip. This advertising is just ridiculous.

they also fail to mention that the PCI-e of p55 is on the CPU.. so even if you put an NF200 chip on the board, all you do is spread the lanes that still go to the 16 lanes on the CPU... You basically add PCI-e slots operating at a higher frequency, but you still only got 16 lanes no matter how you time it or dice it.

I've seen 5GHz on air with a i5 650, wasn't easy to reproduce, but it is possible, after having 3 i7 875Ks though, I'm 99% sure that 5GHz is near impossible, 2 of them wouldn't go over 4.2GHz and were hot as crap, this third one I am playing with, temps are improved, but doesn't seem to like to clock as high. Curious though to see what the board can do. And I do all my air cooling under a Mega with 2x 3k Ultra Kazes.

....so even if you put an NF200 chip on the board, all you do is spread the lanes that still go to the 16 lanes on the CPU... You basically add PCI-e slots operating at a higher frequency, but you still only got 16 lanes no matter how you time it or dice it.

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NF200 is more like a PCI-Express "radio station", if you will. It broadcasts the data to the graphics cards rather than sending the same data through effectively narrow paths, to individual GPUs. That's how it's able to achieve two PCI-E 2.0 x16 links. It also has special features that let graphics cards share their data without CPU overhead, by simply relaying it at the bridge-chip level.

When two or more graphics cards are doing multi-GPU rendering by 'tiling' or alternate-frame-rendering, both graphics cards have the same data on their local memory, so NF200 simply broadcasts whatever it gets. So the single PCI-E 2.0 x16 link between that and the Intel processor doesn't become a bottleneck.

I don't think any real noticible latency is added, either. I mean sure, it adds some, but to the end user, not specifically looknig for it, it's not going to be noticed.

Anyway, we've not got an ECS rep here on thier forum...it was said the ECS is trying to really improve thier brand into the mainstream, so I'm actually quite intereted in this product, as it seems to be one of the first that fits that paradigm.

Sure, Phan, but the compares should be made using 3 cards without the bridgechip, and three cards without the bridgechip, on the same chipset, P55. In this case, I do not see the same thing.

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True - but thats not possible on P55. No P55 can do 3x SLI cards without a bridge chip AFAIK. Point is if you want true TRi-SLI for gaming you wanna go X58 and not a bridge-chipped 1156, because it will perform worse.

Of course. I agree 100%. I see no real purpose in this product with that in mind, however, if it will allow 2x vga, and a RAID card, or maybe 2xvga, and 3rd vga for Phys-X, it does offer a more affordable solution.

Sure, you lose soem performance for the lesser cost, but that makes sense to me.

Keeping that in mind, this board must be priced right to be a workable product, IMHO. That might be hard to pull off...but if this board is $150-$175, i think it fits very well in the market.

Ignoring all specs, that is one nice looking motherboard. I've been waiting for someone to do an all black design like this, but I was expecting EVGA or MSI or Asus to do it. Not ECS. Well done. I don't care how rubbish the board turns out to be, I'd buy it because it's black!

I've seen 5GHz on air with a i5 650, wasn't easy to reproduce, but it is possible, after having 3 i7 875Ks though, I'm 99% sure that 5GHz is near impossible, 2 of them wouldn't go over 4.2GHz and were hot as crap, this third one I am playing with, temps are improved, but doesn't seem to like to clock as high. Curious though to see what the board can do. And I do all my air cooling under a Mega with 2x 3k Ultra Kazes.

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bad comparison. they were using 32nm dual cores to hit 5ghz, not 45nm quads.